New Zealand: One Tree Hill

Driving up from Hamilton to the Whangaparaoa Peninsula on February 26th, we stopped at two high points we hadn’t managed to visit during our main time in Auckland at the beginning of the trip. The first high point was the extinct volcano called Mount Eden, and the other, also an extinct volcano, was One Tree Hill, where Eve ran into some Filipinos whom she didn’t know but who turned out by a striking coincidence to be from her home town. While they were busy talking and figuring out mutual acquaintances, I photographed the clouds that seemed especially well arranged that afternoon and that reminded me of the types of abstracted clouds that Georgia O’Keeffe painted.

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I’ll miss the series too. There’ll be about 10 more posts, and by then you’ll have had quite an idiosyncratic view of how an American saw the natural features of your country.

During my stay I had little contact with Americans, and as far as I know I didn’t run into anyone from New York or Texas there. You’ve just reminded me that in Akaroa we found ourselves walking at one point behind a few Brazilians and I struck up a conversation in my halting Portuguese.

A pity my son wasn’t home; he would have qualified, as a New Yorker. It really is interesting to see how others view your country. I have just been catching up with LIsa Dorenfest’s blog. http://lisadorenfest.com/ Her posts and photos show me a whole new side to the country of my birth. Her perspective is from the sea.

As for O’Keeffe, when she was young she lived for a time in Canyon, in the Texas Panhandle, which is more like the New Mexico she later moved to than it is like the Hill Country that stretches west from Austin. You can read more about her time in Texas at

When the page opened, the first thing that came to mind was “Sky Above Clouds.” I especially like the way you’ve bookended the clouds between the hills and the swath of blue at the top of the photo. I was interested to see that these fair weather cumulus have a life span of 5 to 40 minutes. You may have arrived there at just the right time.

When I saw the photograph on my computer screen I noticed the blue fringe across the top that harmonizes with the similarly dark strip across the bottom. At the time I took the picture, however, I concentrated solely on the line of hills across the bottom: this was Auckland, the largest city in the country, and aiming even a smidgen lower would have begun to show buildings.

[…] The pleasant Georgia-O’Keeffe-esque cumulus clouds that I saw from Auckland’s One Tree Hill on the afternoon of February 26th gave way to these dynamic, partly wispy, sunrise-tinged ones above Little Manly Beach early on the morning of the 27th. […]